It’s Time to Stop Using The Word “Retard”
From Special Ed to starter in the National Football League, I’m 6-foot-3, 300 pounds, and learning disabled — and I dare you to call me retarded.
By Kasey Studdard (as told to Jamie O’Grady)
B y virtually any measure, I have been blessed with an amazing life. I have both supporting and loving parents and a sister, a wonderful (pregnant!) wife, great friends, and a rare gift of athletic ability that has allowed me to experience life in a way that only a very select group of people ever will.
Only, before I played six seasons in the NFL; before I was a three-year starter and captain of the University of Texas football team; and before I earned high school varsity letters in football, basketball, and track and field, I was just another learning-disabled special education student.
I was teased, ridiculed, and isolated. And I was not alone.
Though I was never given an official diagnosis — which isn’t to say I wasn’t tested; they subjected me to every test under the sun — my issues initially manifested themselves as early as first grade. It wasn’t for a lack of intelligence, but I simply couldn’t comprehend things in the same ways the other kids did. Not only was I slow to process information, but I found even the simplest of lessons to be overwhelming. While most of my classmates were able to grasp concepts after a first or second explanation, I needed things read back to me multiple times, and even then, though I often nodded my head to signal that I understood, I did not.
It wasn’t long before parent-teacher meetings were scheduled, and soon after, I was placed in classes with the other learning-disabled kids in my school. It was traumatic at that age, especially considering the merciless teasing that came along with it. Kids can be very mean, and not only was I “slow,” but I also was short and … stout, which made a prime target.
“Ha-ha, you’re in the RETARD class now!,” they mocked. “Kasey’s so stupid, they had to kick him out of our class,” they teased.
It didn’t matter that my dad was Dave Studdard — he of the Denver Broncos, starting offensive tackle whose responsibility it was to protect the legendary John Elway. No one cared that the great Earl Campell often had dinner at our house. The fact that Rhonda Kubiak — wife of now-Broncos head coach Gary Kubiak — had changed my diapers as a baby was irrelevant.
To the bullies who saw me as different, I was just a whipping boy, someone who was far more deserving of their scorn than their sympathy or understanding.
Now, many years later, I realize that those kids weren’t really the problem. We all are the problem, and things haven’t really changed.
It’s been over two decades since anyone thought of me as a slow, little, fat kid wallowing in a lack of self-confidence, wishing he could just be like everybody else. In my early teens, I went through a major growth spurt, and to my surprise, I found that I could do things on the court and on the field that other kids could not.
Sports became my salvation. When I stepped inside the white lines, all my insecurities and fears melted away. There, I no longer needed to worry about not being able to understand everything, I just needed to let my God-given talent take over. There, my classmates and friends still looked at me as “special,” only not because I couldn’t keep up, but because they were having trouble keeping up with me.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t live solely on the ballfields, and to survive in the “real” world growing up, I needed (and got) phenomenal family support.
If my dad was the rock star of the family, my mom, Cecilia, was the rock. She was a teacher at my middle school (she still is, in fact), and she made it very clear early on that despite my learning disability (and my aptitude for sports), I would be expected to achieve my full educational potential. That meant years and years of remedial coursework, time spent before and after school, and countless late nights just to keep up. My mother always made sure the work got done — and for that I will be eternally grateful.
Later, as captain of the Texas Longhorns, and, eventually, as a member of the Houston Texans, my learning disability stood as a significant impediment to being the best I could be on the field. To say that NFL playbooks are complicated would be to put it very, very lightly.
Ultimately, being strong as an ox and maintaining perfect technique isn’t that useful if you have no clue which direction your teammates are headed or where the ball is supposed to be. It literally took me years to master the plays, and even after I considered them memorized, I still made sure to go back to my diagrams, to stay late to ask questions of the coaching staff, and to sit for extra video sessions. It’s what I needed to do to keep up.
Looking back on it, though, it wasn’t the hard work that impacted me most growing up. It was the other students, my special education classmates — the ones with severe mental and physical disabilities who had it far worse than I did — who taught me more about life than any lesson plan ever could. For them, the struggle wasn’t just about self-esteem or fitting in or being “normal,” it was about survival itself. They faced daily challenges the vast majority of us will never understand, let alone experience ourselves.
That’s why I have always stood up for the less-fortunate. When bullies used to throw pennies on the floor of our high school cafeteria, and laugh as my disabled classmates scurried to collect them, I grabbed them by the shirt collars and told them exactly what would be coming to them if I ever caught wind of them acting that way again. Whenever I saw a disabled or disadvantaged child at one of our training camps, I would always take time to greet them with a smile and a hug, and to ask how they were doing — knowing the impact a small gesture like that can make.
It’s also why my wife and I are launching a foundation to allow children to experience the joys of the outdoors. Not all kids are capable of using sports as an outlet as I did, so it’s incumbent upon me to help provide a way for those in need. In this case, I want them to be able to explore their world and experience nature in safe and stimulating ways, without fear of being singled out on account of being disabled, or slow, or poor … or different.
Understanding my background, you can guess that education and opportunity initiatives mean a lot to me, and as excited as I am about how the foundation will be able to help a select number of children, we still have so much work to do. Nationwide, we need to make sure our education system can meet the needs of all types of students, but we have even more progress to make in Texas, my adopted home state. While showing some recent improvements in overall education funding, Texas currently ranks 46th out of the 50 states, and it’s dead last in funding for special education programs, per a 2014 study. This in a state with the country’s second-largest population and three of America’s 10 fastest growing cities.
Quite simply, we are not doing enough.
I know my future would have been markedly worse had it not been for the dedicated teachers and support network I had growing up who helped me manage and work through my learning disabilities. I want others who are in similar shoes to have the chance to reach their full potential, whether or not that includes athletic ability that helps them fit in.
That brings me back to my grander point — one of acceptance. Bullying remains a major issue in our education system, and while it may or may not be “worse” than when I was in school, it’s definitely more out in the open thanks to the Internet and social media. Nowadays, with so many more ways for children to connect with each other and be defined (good and bad), their differences and disabilities which make it harder to fit in become magnified — and oftentimes, the spotlight can be hurtful.
Children — and their parents, from whom kids learn their early behavior — have very powerful voices in their social circles. Words can, and do, hurt. Learning more about the way to talk about your peers is an important part to promoting the acceptance I, and others in my situation, craved.
Together, we can do this, but that means all of us, from parents and teachers on down. I was one of the lucky ones — with sports providing salvation just in time — but everyone deserves an opportunity to shine, and all the funding in the world won’t be enough unless we make acceptance and understanding more common than bullying and labels.
